[p2p-research] devastating story on cradle to cradle founder

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Paul,

thanks so much for sharing this, so illuminating, and of course, some of
these things have happened to me as well ...  it's exhilirating to construct
the p2p-foundation, while being exhausting to bump against repeated
failures, especially in terms of providing a stable income for my family ...
I'm struggling to keep that dog away ...

Michel

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Paul D. Fernhout <
pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

> Kevin Carson wrote:
>
>> On 7/21/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/the-mortal-messiah.html?page=0%2C0
>>>
>>> This is also a very interesting story to cover for our blog, as it shows
>>> how
>>> the proprietary approach has made the project of cradle to cradle
>>> production
>>> fail,
>>>
>>
>> "...the architect said, 'I want to be the Bill Gates of
>> sustainability,' and [that] he wants to make a royalty off of every
>> green standard and every green product out there."
>>
>> This just about floored me, because the vibe I'd been picking up from
>> the whole article was "Bill Gates."
>>
>> The technologies that save the world will be those that ordinary
>> people can adopt for themselves at low cost, without paying royalties
>> to some greenwashed billionaire.
>>
>
> This seems like an essential part of the article:
>  "Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough "
>  http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1042475/print
> """
> For those who came to know McDonough from within the environmental and
> design movements -- those whose labors rarely reach the ears of Laurie David
> -- an alternative narrative exists about him. Until now, it has been
> shielded from the mainstream for two reasons: First, McDonough has done more
> than most to popularize the very idea of cleaning up the world, and for
> that, even his detractors agree he deserves thanks; second, if word gets out
> that he may not be all that he appears, the overall cause of sustainability
> could suffer. "He's been incredibly important and valuable in this role as
> visionary," says Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability at
> Aspen Skiing Co. "The problem is that sometimes the theorists like McDonough
> will represent themselves as practitioners, and that's where the guys in the
> trenches get frustrated."
> """
>
> And also this:
> """
> McDonough desperately needs to break the logjam that has stalled him. Just
> as the global fixation on sustainability is exploding, McDonough's design
> revolution is paralyzed -- and he is the paralyzing agent, unable to
> capitalize on his brilliant, crucial idea, but unwilling to set it free.
> Last year, Environmental Building News deemed McDonough's cradle-to-cradle
> certification a "black box": "You can see what's going in and what's going
> out, but you're not privy to exactly what's going on inside the process,"
> says Nadav Malin, the trade journal's editor. In truth, among MBDC's 160
> certifications, virtually the only consumer brands are the U.S. Postal
> Service and Kiehl's -- the latter of which Brad Pitt helped push through as
> a charity product for his foundation. Critics argue that McDonough's work is
> not transparent or consensus based, and that because he sometimes consults
> for companies whose products he's also certifying, the whole endeavor is
> conflicted, if not unethical. "All the money stays in one place," says Tim
> Cole, director of environmental initiatives and product development at Forbo
> Flooring, and treasurer of the USGBC. The impression that emerges, says
> Cole, is, " 'Hey, if you want your product certified cradle to cradle, just
> go to McDonough, pay your price, and it will happen.' I think cradle to
> cradle will either have to get better or become a thing of the past. You
> have to evolve with the movement." McDonough is trying. His latest strategy
> involves, once again, opening up the work to the public -- this time to
> develop MBDC's materials database Wiki-style.
> """
>
> Because I was involved with organic food certification in the 1980s, I can
> see the value of certification in general, and know it can be done
> reasonable ethically (though in theory there could in theory remain issues
> with cosy boards made up of farmers certifying each other, though that is
> not what I saw in practice). I've long thought, for example, one could apply
> the certification idea to free and open source software in some way (people
> demonstrating a knowledge of copyright issue to get certified as producing
> stuff likely to be uncontaminated by proprietary stuff). I like the idea of
> applying certification to manufactured goods. So, I like that aspect of
> cradle-to-cradle whatever else one could say about who gets any profits from
> certification (in practice, if done by a non-profit, these certification
> processes may be run at just about cost with little profit).
>
> It seems like there are at least two big failure modes in being an
> activist, neither of which is either to avoid in a new area a long time
> before it becomes mainstream.
>
> One failure mode is outlined here for William McDonough and relates to the
> celebrity worshiping winner-take-all economic culture we have constructed
> for ourselves. It is where you try so hard to push an idea, yet you still
> need money for living expenses, that, in a quest for right livelihood, your
> public persona becomes the idea and your finances become the idea. People
> often like to be around celebrities, and when you become one in the process
> of promoting an idea, it gets hard to put in lots of footnotes as to sources
> in everything you say (even if you may start out wanting to and doing so).
> And as you get your presentations down, and as the ideas become more of
> yourself, the roots may fade away, maybe even to the point where you believe
> in the originality of it all yourself. And if you are the kind of person
> good at taking ideas and making them your own and presenting them in
> innovative ways, and so on, chances are you are not a "scholar" to begin
> with (with frequent footnotes, cautious pronouncements, careful caveats,
> etc.). Part of the failure mode is that you may start to annoy everyone
> whose work you build on, people who also would also like a bit of the
> limelight (and the funding,  give the lack of a basic income), and you may
> come to believe your own hype. This is the rock star failure mode. Another
> aspect is over confidence (the New Yorker just had an essay about that and
> financial markets and Bear Sterns, given appearing optimistic leads to more
> support.) There is another aspect, too. You can see it in music too as well
> as visual arts -- people just making more of the same that pays and then
> burning out from boredom and fear of taking risks and seeming foolish
> (including wanting to hide failures). Once people have been heavily rewarded
> for doing one thing, it can be hard to go back to joyful roots and
> experimentation including documenting failures (since most experiments will
> be failures, being tolerant of failure is an important aspect of being a
> researcher, something Hans Moravec has said). Bucky Fuller had aspects of
> this rock star failure mode too (for example, the issue of who invented the
> tensegrity idea), although he also made genuine contributions in his own
> way. Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project suffered some of this too.
>
> But there is an opposite failure mode (one I'm more enmeshed in myself. :-)
> That is the one that leads to cynicism and inaction and pessimism and
> focusing more on some minor aspect of infrastructure (or even wishful
> thinking) than getting out a message in an effective way. Also, as the years
> go by, you can become bitter and twisted and defensive as a person, having
> fought one emotional and intellectual battle after another, until everything
> is a conflict, everything is an assumed failure, every person is assumed to
> be unsympathetic, which of course also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,
> because who wants to hang out with bitter or timid or critical people. It's
> also a sort of "learned helplessness" like Martin Seligman studied,
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
> where for example, an experimenter shocks a dog every time it tries to walk
> over part of a floor towards its food dish, and pretty soon the dog curls up
> in a corner and stops trying to get across the floor even as it starves.
> Even after the experimenter drags the dog across the floor to the food, the
> dog remains dysfunctional. For me, after about twenty years of being
> interested in a sustainable design system, but being at places where it was
> of little interest (I tried to get a PhD related to it at four different
> universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as start a related
> business),
>  http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
>  http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
> and not having the talents or experiences or connections or interests or
> starting capital or willingness to focus (or compromise) that William
> McDonough had, I'm more in the second category, the hungry dog that won't go
> over to the food dish that it is staring at. :-)
>
> These of course are exaggerations; real people, with real lives, and real
> families, of course are more complicated than prototypical rock stars or
> helpless starving dogs. All people have strengths and weaknesses, and there
> are even situations where weaknesses become strengths, and strengths can
> become weaknesses. :-) But there is still an element of truth to both
> extremes as risks for any activist.
>
> So, it's very heartening to see the people posting to the p2presearch list
> or the open manufacturing list or many other places, people who may be more
> new to these ideas, but who see them differently -- as stuff that is
> happening now, but without the baggage of either having made a living off of
> them for a decade or two, or *not* having made a living off of them for a
> decade or two. :-) A new generation shows up with the same hope and
> enthusiasm and openness that William and I started out with, but I can still
> hope more comes from it now in a global and open way. That article is
> hopeful about these ideas as a movement, mentioning someone who "knows more
> than 100 sustainability executives".
>
> And as I said about my overly ambitious graduate school plans: "The good
> news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen
> that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design
> self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational
> resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For
> example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early
> 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed
> color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia
> and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable
> in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal
> [self-replicating and self-reliant habitats]) is now approachable without
> needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed."
>
> Still, my own complaint about the copyright and secrecy issue is that
> Appropedia (which I am not affiliate with, but is similar to my OSCOMAK
> project in some ways), did not win the first Buckminster Fuller challenge
> when William McDonough was one of the judges. Was there a sense that an
> excellent free project like Appropedia would compete with his business?
>  http://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia
>  http://challenge.bfi.org/application_summary/149
>  http://challenge.bfi.org/jurors
>
> OSCOMAK also did not get the prize the next year, either. :-)
>  http://challenge.bfi.org/application_summary/362#
> In both cases, specific projects were chosen for the challenge winner, not
> general tools for helping anyone be a better designer. Of course, there
> could be lots of reasons projects were not chosen (see my second failure
> mode above. :-)
>
> But, it is often the case that even non-profits, with boards made of people
> successful in the current system, work against an open and abundant future
> for all. For example:
>  "The NED, NGOs and the Imperial Uses of Philanthropy: Why They Hate Our
> Kind Hearts, Too"
>  http://www.counterpunch.org/roelofs05132006.html
> """
> If the source is confusing, the message is usually clear: "democratization"
> strives for civil rights and elections, but it also must include an open
> door to foreign capital, labor contracts, resource extraction, and military
> training. These networks also define "civil society" to include rock
> concerts and street mobs, but not government-provided maternal health
> clinics, child care, or senior services.
> """
>
> See, there's the learned helplessness bitterness coming up again of my own
> failure mode. :-)
>
> Anyway, I still have a lot of sympathy and respect for the guy. He's a
> human being trying to navigate a difficult transition from a competitive
> capitalist economy to a post-scarcity globally abundant society while also
> looking to his personal survival. It's not an easy situation for anybody to
> be in. And everyone makes mistakes.
>
> People doing this sort of work openly as a hobby, or who do this work as a
> retired person with a basic income from social security, or a person who has
> inherited wealth, or one who has a working spouse who likes his or her job,
> or one who works at a grant-funded non-profit or government agency or
> university with support to work on sustainability issues, are on much safer
> ground to avoid one of these two extremes. Although each of those comes with
> baggage to:
> * hobbyists often have limited time;
> * retired people have less energy;
> * inherited wealth usually comes with a world view and also guilt and
> enmeshment in things-as-they-are;
> * stay-at-home parents have other responsibilities or the spouse may not
> like their job and complain about money issues;
> * people in a university setting are ofter "Disciplined Minds";
> * government agencies tend to hierarchical solutions that are politically
> directed; and
> * non-profits are sometimes more about getting grants (including changing
> their programs to meet grantmakers criterion) than using the grants in an
> innovative or risk-taking way.
>
> There are no easy answers to this. But, still, bit by bit, we seem to be
> crawling towards some better solutions. From Winston Churchill:
>
> http://history-and-education.blogspot.com/2008/10/churchill-on-america-and-brief-research.html
> "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have
> exhausted all other possibilities."
>
> --Paul Fernhout
> http://www.pdfernhout.net/
>
>
>
>
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